Can You Have the Color “Hazel Blue”?

Welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Tristan. I’m calling from San Antonio.

Well, I have a question that relates to the color of my eyes. It actually came up a couple of decades ago, so it’s nice to finally get around to asking your opinion on it. Too bad I wasn’t aware of the show back then.

Okay, so 20 years later.

So for about the first three decades of my life, a little more than that, I knew my eye color to be hazel blue, or I just abbreviated that as hazel, to the point of listing hazel as my eye color when I got my first driver’s license. And I was happy with that. Nobody complained.

Until I married my first wife. She was Romanian with no dialect, bias, and English. And she saw that on my driver’s license and was even a little bit shocked.

And challenged me to the point of me actually correcting my eye color.

On my driver’s license, which now is blue.

So it no longer says hazel blue, but it used to.

Yeah, it used to just say hazel.

It wasn’t known for hazel blue.

Oh, I see.

I just said hazel.

Yeah, that’s a really good summary of this.

Hazel blue is extraordinarily rare as a pair of words in English.

We can look at corpora, these large bodies of text that linguists and nexicographers use to figure out what’s really happening in language.

And by far and away, hazel green, if we’re going to pair hazel with a color, is the pairing that you’ll see.

Followed by hazel brown.

And hazel blue is incredibly rare.

Like people rarely use it for anything.

But part of the problem with this is that it’s been, people don’t always understand that the hazel is supposed to be the color of the hazelnut or the filbert, which is the same nut.

It’s kind of this, typically this light brown or yellowish brown.

So I have a little library here and looking in books devoted to defining color.

Their definitions of hazel are all over the place.

One says a brown tinged with red.

Another one says light brown to mildly green or golden in color.

My favorite one, though, is from an 1821 book.

It says that hazel is, quote, the color of the common weasel or the light parts of feathers on the back of a snipe.

Is that what your eyes look like? No, like they’re more of a blue gray. Yeah, but you let me ask you.

For you, is hazel the word hazel? Is that only about color or does that suggest texture as well?

Because for some people it’s about the almost spotty or checkerboard pattern of brown in the eyes.

Yeah, I think because I was even actually I was trying to find out if it was just something I interpreted or if other family members also associate with the blue because my sister also had what we called hazel eyes, but hers are more hazel green.

But she even thought mine were more more hazel because, and I think it comes down more to the texture, like, but kind of the mixture of although in my case it’s mostly just, you know, shades of blue and gray.

But yeah, but the idea that this idea is not a pure image of any given color.

Well, colors are notoriously hard to define, as we just learned from the dictionaries.

But you can also just get around the problem by calling your eyes avelaneous, which also means the color of the hazelnut or the filbert nut, A-V-E-L-L-A-N-E-O-U-S, avelaneous.

Well, that sounds like it’s going to be more of a shade of brown than my own eyes.

Yeah.

All right. Well, Tristan, thank you so much for calling. That’s a really interesting question. I never thought about it.

We appreciate it.

Thank you, too.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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